You said:
> This particular compiler does require bootstrapping, and that's obviously what "the compiler" is referring to in that comment.
You have to pick an option: either it requires bootstrapping, or it doesn’t.
As it’s possible to write the C++20 compiler features in C++11 (or whatever GCC or Clang are written in these days), it factually does not require bootstrapping.
Here, "requires bootstrapping" means "gcc needs to be able to build with gcc, including older versions of gcc."